Recently

Many activists are so wedded to the 1970s neighborhood preservation narratives that they fail to recognize that the challenge to the community’s economic diversity has changed.

Generation Priced Out was a fantastic read, the perfect book to start with if you’re interested in the current housing crisis.

Typically gentrification can be predicted by an influx of hippies, punks, and artists moving into an area. Now, upwardly mobile bicyclists can be added to that list of predictors, too.

Bike Lanes Are White Lanes was emphatically not good. There should be a book that properly considers the fear of amenities, and the ramifications of the amenity effect, but this wasn’t it.

Sometimes I think of the men who died making the Brooklyn Bridge; sometimes I play a game on my phone. This is as close as it gets to the sacred for me, to be on a public conveyance, in the arms of a transit authority, part of a system, to know that the infrastructure has been designed for my safety. In the winter, I can look down into the icy East River and fantasize about what it would take to push us into the river, because only a small, low concrete barrier keeps us from death. I think of how I’d escape and how I’d help others up. But the bus never hurtles into the water. They made sure of it.

Why I (Still) Love Tech by Paul Ford is another lovely piece by the writer of What is Code?, and, one of my favorites, The Web Is a Customer Service Medium.

But because companies compensate procurement based on saving money rather than making good decisions about what to buy, we can sell crappy products at a steep discount but not good products at list price.

My Losing Battle with Enterprise Sales is an unusually good article for being about startup sales – probably mostly of interest to those in the ‘business world’, but also a good look at how corporations and markets are inherently inefficient.

Reading a couple hundred books a year is the bare minimum. It’s just the baseline. You also need to be embedded in a community of others who have diverse perspectives to bounce these ideas off of.

Steve Krouse’s notes from A Lunch With Alan Kay. I find this bit kind of funny, because the only people who can read hundreds of books a year are retirees and those reading very short books.

My trip to the Channel Islands was lovely, and I’ve posted most of the photos to /photos.

Exorcism, pessimism has arisen
There’s no reason really, treason to myself so silly
So perfect, so perfect, so why do I look for curtains?

James Blake & André 3000’s ‘Where’s The Catch’ was on rotation this month. In my mind it’s a pair with Sunday.